“I’m in a suit on K Street. It’s like one day I woke up and all of a sudden I had become the biggest tool in the world.” – Some dude on cell phone at K & 14th.
January 12, 2011
No Laughing Matter
By Aneurin Roosevelt
At Netroots UK this weekend Media Matters for America‘s speaker, Ari Rabin-Havat, begged the audience to mobilise against Rupert Murdoch’s proposed buy out of BSkyB.
He demonstrated the seriousness of Fox News’s deterioration into a rhetoric-fuelled propaganda channel through a series of Fox News clips and closed with a warning: don’t let this happen in the UK.
The audience laughed at classic Fox moments like this one where Glenn Beck compares Nazis and Soviet Communists to the current American left, but after a few clips it began to dawn on delegates that this was really passing for news in the U.S. Hours later thousands of miles away a man shot US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others at a constituency event in Arizona. Among the factors widely thought to have contributed to this unhinged individual’s attack: the vitriolic nature of American political discourse.
http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/flash/player.swf
U.S. media didn’t get this way overnight. One day Fox was a right-leaning news network: a few years later they were prematurely calling the election for George W, and now it’s finally transitioned to a full-on 24/7 promotional arm of the Republican party.
One Netroots delegate exclaimed that Sky could never take off in the UK as the British were just ‘too reasonable’. But in America most citizens were shielded from the subtle moves made by Fox News, as well as to changes to surrounding media as the news environment gradually changed around them. The effect was people didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late – much like lobsters in a boiling pot. Ari might have done well to emphasis the gradual nature of the change in Fox News, which was not apparent to the British audience.
So could a NewsCorp-owned BSkyB lead to Fox News UK? Rumour has it that Murdock wants one, but News Corp gaining the controlling stake in BSkyB won’t by itself allow Sky News to do the same thing in the UK.
Even if the merger is allowed to go through, there are other barriers preventing Sky evolving into a UK version of Fox. At present Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code requires ‘due impartiality’ from news broadcasters. Further, politicians are explicitly prevented from filling a newsreader/anchor or reporter role unless their affiliation is made explicit to the audience. That is not to say that these rules could not be relaxed in the future, but this is where progressive groups online have a lot to contribute.
The key then is engaging with the community, recognising the risks to all types of media, and then influencing MPs and the regulator on a range of media policy issues, not only about the proposed take over. It’s often too easy for politicians to dismiss media policy as an important secondary area while online activists shrug their shoulders to ‘old media’ issues, but the stakes are high. In America left-leaning and moderate U.S. politicians have difficuilty communicating any kind of reasoned policy argument through mainstream media. As a result in-depth discussion is hard to find for people who aren’t looking. To be sure there are a range of places where people can get news from all parts of the political spectrum, but for those without a partisan agenda, television news still plays a powerful role in presenting different sides of the debate.
On the whole, Netroots discussions downplayed the importance of linking the progressive grassroots online with influencing mainstream media which is a shame. As Ari’s presentation demonstrated, when but when parts of the news media loose a grip on the truth, all other forms of political and policy discussions are jeopardised.
SPIN DOCTORATE 